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Photos courtesy of Lydia Patterson.
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With 300 seats, and plans to expand to 600 seats, Mosaic Church installed what may have been the first use of the d&b audiotechnik 10AL loudspeakers here in the United States.
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On their way to reaching 20% of the Orlando area, Mosaic Church (Lead Pastor, Renaut van der Reit shown here) has outgrown two venues and now operates three area campuses. Photo by Alexandra Buck
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Mosaic Church wanted something that closely resembled an analog board to ease the transition to digital for the volunteers. The M7CL seemed the best hybrid solution.
Some may see this as too lofty a goal for a church, but God's hand has been present in the growth of this 10-year-old church plant and has opened opportunities for van der Riet that may well position Mosaic to achieve this goal.
The history
“Renaut and his family moved from California to the Orlando area with a vision for planting a church,” Amato says. “It began with a few families that moved with them from California, as well as a few neighbors, meeting in the subdivision’s clubhouse. Eventually the meetings grew, and approached being in conflict with code regulations, and we started meeting Sunday evenings in another church’s facility while seeking God’s guidance for a permanent home.”
The church had been given a plot of land on which to build, but before they began the process, van der Riet heard of another building for sale that might work well for them. However, the $2.5 million price tag was out of reach for a church of 100 people.
“Renaut looked at the building anyway,” adds Amato, “believing that if it was the right place for us, God would provide.”
The building was well suited for their needs. Very shortly after looking at the building, van der Riet received a call from an outside donor saying that a very large contract had just come through for his business, and was there anything the church needed?
“Renaut jokingly said $1 million would be helpful,” relates Amato, “and the man said, ‘I think we can make that work.’”
The church was able to negotiate a $1.9 million purchase price on the building, and sold its property for $600,000, leaving $300,000 for a mortgage amount, which was
easily doable for this small but growing congregation.
Since then, Mosaic has grown to more than 2,000 people and launched two additional campuses in the Orlando area—a video venue campus in Winter Garden, and a campus with its own teaching pastor in a Holiday Inn on the Walt Disney World property.
“Disney people have odd schedules,” Amato reports. “There are lots of college kids working there, and with the church meeting on Disney property, they can take Disney transportation to get there. That campus meets on Sundays at 8 p.m. Disney really has its own culture, so having a message that follows the same theme as what’s being taught at the other two campuses, but contextualized towards that culture, makes it more relatable.”
Amato became involved in Mosaic right from the beginning. As a teenager, his girlfriend (and now wife) was one of van der Riet’s neighbors, and Amato became involved with the church’s production team. Amato is now full-time staff and shares the responsibility of overseeing technical ministries at Mosaic with Worship Pastor Shawn Starbuck.
Time to expand
"So that’s the goal he has set for Mosaic Church over the next 5-10 years—to reach 20%, or about half a million people, in the greater Orlando area.”
As the church continued to grow, it needed to expand the facility to accommodate numbers and upgrade the technical systems to better support both those attending the Oakland campus as well as the Winter Garden video venue.
One of the first improvements was to replace the Bose L1 portable line array system used for the front-of-house (FOH) PA system with something more permanent and capable of covering the current and to-be-expanded seating area. While it served them well when a smaller congregation, it wasn’t up to covering the 300-seat auditorium—never mind the 600-seats planned for the expansion.
“After listening to a lot of systems, we decided on a d&b audiotechnik loudspeaker system,” states Amato. “We love the clarity of the d&b cabinets, and it just sounded better to us. With the directionality of the line array system, we didn’t need to add much acoustical treatment to the room. And with the 110-degree spread pattern of the 10AL cabinets, we didn’t need to add front-fills either. It was the best we listened to, and it fit within our budget.”
Gill Parente, at the time with Entertainment Arts in Orlando, did the sound system design for Mosaic. “The church had already decided upon d&b when I was brought in to do the specific design. We modeled the room with Enhanced Acoustical Simulator for Engineers (EASE) to select proper cabinets, and ended up with a stereo array with three 10A and two 10AL cabinets per side. This may have been the first 10AL installation in the United States; d&b was definitely the best choice for the room.”
Four d&b B4 subs provide low-end coverage, and three d&b D6 amplifiers provide the power. Signal processing capabilities are built in to the amplifiers, so no external DSP was needed to configure and tune the system.
A Yamaha M7CL audio console was selected for its user-friendliness. “We wanted something that closely resembled an analog board to ease the transition to digital for the volunteers,” states Amato, “and the M7CL seemed the best hybrid solution.”
Shure in-ear monitors and some front-line wedges are used for monitors, all mixed from the M7CL console.
“We’re considering adding a Dante digital audio card to the M7CL and installing an Allen & Heath ME personal monitor system in the future,” Amato reports. Adding Dante would also make it easier to route audio to both recording and broadcast.
A new plan for video
The video system was designed and installed by Amato. Blackmagic Design components make up most of the video control system, with the ATEM 2ME (two mix-effect) video production switcher forming the core of the control system. With two switching systems in the switcher, Amato can control both a broadcast feed as well as an IMAG feed from the same switcher.
Blackmagic ATEM Studio and Camera converters provide bi-directional communications and video transmission between the camera positions and the switcher over fiber optic cable. Tally light signals, intercom and actual camera video and audio are sent over one fiber optic cable pair to each camera position.
Blackmagic HyperDeck Studio systems capture ISO feeds of each camera, as well as the output of the broadcast feed of the switcher onto Kingston SSD drives; the drive from the recorded service gets transferred to the Winter Garden campus for playback via sneakernet (i.e., by person).
“The YMCA wants Pastor Renaut to help them put the ‘C’ back in ‘YMCA.'"
Jeff Amato
Production Lead, Mosaic Church, Oakland, FL
Sony NX5u video camcorders are used in the auditorium for video capture. “We like the Sony cameras because they have HD-SDI on board,” notes Amato. “For the price-point, it was the best HD-SDI solution.” The cameras are also used as needed for on-location video shoots as part of producing promo videos and sermon illustrations.
Lighting improvements
“We originally had 16 PAR can fixtures providing all the stage lighting,” says Amato. “This was creatively inadequate.”
Having built a relationship with the church through the audio system design and installation, Parente was called in to do the lighting design as part of the auditorium expansion project.
“We needed to add better coverage of the downstage area,” states Parente, “as well as add a color wash to the stage and seating area.”
Chauvet Legend 412 LED intelligent fixtures were used for the color washes, allowing the church to re-aim them as needed during a service. For front lighting, Philips Selecon PL4 LED ellipsoidal fixtures are used.
“We have a good relationship with Philips,” comments Parente, “and their Ellipsoidal LED fixtures are full color-changing fixtures without any of the odd colored-shadowing artifacts at the beam’s edge that some other LED fixtures have.”
ETC battens with power and DMX distribution are installed at the lighting positions to provide data and power to all the fixtures.
A Strand 250ML console runs the system, chosen for its cost-effectiveness in the moving-light console space. “The church strongly desired to have a physical console and not something that runs on a PC,” explains Parente. “This was the only option that fit their budget.”
“The 250ML gives us a solution for now, but we are looking into a better solution that is more user-friendly,” comments Amato.
Reaching the 20%
The permanent facility and one successful video venue campus has put Mosaic on the path to achieving its goals. Van der Riet was recently invited to join the board of the Orlando-area YMCA, and this move may put Mosaic a large step forward.
“The YMCA said they wanted Renaut to help them put the ‘C’ back in ‘YMCA,’” explains Amato. “This creates the potential for Mosaic to create video venue churches inside a number of the YMCA facilities in the greater Orlando area. Our Winter Garden campus has proven to be a great test-bed for the video venue concept for us.”
And he adds, “As these little Biblical missional communities develop, the goal is to make that 20% a reality, and change the spiritual course of Orlando.”
